The Red House
A Black family is being evicted after a long, fraught journey with the housing courts and criminal courts. Protestors have surrounded the house with barricades and have so far kept police at Bay.
It's a public face to the crises of evictions happening all over, and an especially complex story. I'm trying to read what activists after writing about it all, especially at how Black people are expected to turn to systems that have repeatedly betrayed them.
The eviction crises is bringing up some lingering sadness. I can tell the memories of my own experience of eviction and homelessness aren't flaring to life, only the grief remains like a cinder with a little glow of fire left.
Unsolicited Diet Propaganda
Today an order of supplements arrived for us. The red rice yeast compound I take that's a precursor to statins I'm taking to address my cholesterol and a new formulation of zinc that should be easier on CK's digestive system. Great!
Given it was 2 pill bottles the box was very large and heavy. Inside, carefully packed in a plastic bag and under plastic pillows, was a complimentary copy of The Longevity Diet.
Yes, there lurking under stuff we need, a book promoting fasting. Diet Culture propaganda from the Wellness Industrial Complex.
I was so grossed out by this unsolicited material. Like Diet Culture aren't a dick pic to me!
I ultimately hurled it into the garage. I'll grab it and put it with the other diet books I've boxed up. I'll be writing a letter to the company; give me free shipping for fuck's sake, don't send me propaganda.
Not the way to start the morning after trauma therapy. I'm sure that made it feel all the more disgusting.
I wanted to do more today, but I ended up laying down after lunch under my weighted blanket. Yesterday's session has left me feeling especially drained and wrung out.
Ursa napped with me and Bertie. It's the first time he's done this and it was just what I needed.
The More I Know
Some days I think I've uncovered all the things I'm angry at my Mother about. Then I start to unpack another memory that feeds my false belief that I'm so profoundly toxic that it makes sense that everyone leaves me. I'm not worthy of real love because I'm terrible.
On days like that I wish she was still alive so I could rage at her. There is part of me that feels really angry that I don't get to really tell off any of these terrible people in my childhood. They're all dead.
The best revenge is living well, so they say. I guess that's why I do this ugly work of letting these memories out so that I can integrate them.
⚠️Content Warning: Child Sexual Abuse, Neglect, Emotional Abuse, Verbal Abuse.⚠️
⚠️Content Warning: Child Abuse⚠️
⚠️Content Warning: Child Abuse⚠️
⚠️Content Warning: Child Abuse⚠️
⚠️Content Warning: Child Abuse⚠️
Age Six Sherri believed it didn't matter what happened to her. She was that worthless; she believed her Mother who told her over and over that she ruined everything. Whenever things went wrong, it was always Sherri's fault somehow. She got into everything and didn't respect her Mother's personal property. She talked too much and was too nosey. She got what was coming to her.
Two sessions in with this memory and I know that I was sexually abused over a period of weeks, months. My Mother was alerted to it by a doctor, possibly even school. She totally denied it could be possible in any way and fabricated the notion that I wasn't fastidious about my hygiene. She regularly left me home alone at night to go on dates and I was home alone after school.
I was SIX.
I wish she was alive so I could rage at her.
Tender Points
I saw my PT today and she worked on my jaw and neck, as well as hip and lower back pain. Truly, my whole left side has had increasing issues for weeks now with interconnected pain from my head to the foot.
IW releases tender points that occur on my body. They're created when the various circulatory systems in the body don't flow. She then moves the body to unlock the area. It's remarkable work.
Sometimes treatment immediately improved my energy, other times I feel tired. And some days it feels like I've been put through the wringer. Today was a wringer.
I'll feel better over the next day or two. Today I got under my weighted blanket and just rested. The work on my jaw is releasing the trauma held there related to the memory from she 6, I felt waves of grief with those.
Meltdown Day
Saturday the 21st, in which a discussion about fruit derails my entire day.
Some days I really hate my brain.
Today evening made me cry for most of the daylight hours leaving me with an even worse headache than yesterday. I ended up watching an anime movie I love, Nausicaä the Valley of the Wind and working up to eating food.
CK suggested I’m feeling burn out. I told her later that my brain’s immediate response to her saying that was, “I can’t be burnt out! I don’t have enough done yet!”
Getting the dishwasher loaded feels like a huge accomplishment. Likewise for getting the last of the instant mashed potatoes into food service containers.
Tomorrow will hopefully be easier.
Age Five
Today I installed the memory from age five that connects to my belief that I'm worthless, not worth keeping safe. An awful memory where I'm witness to terrible physical abuse.
A side effect of low income housing was seeing the casual abuse that happened all the time. It was the 1970s, no one was thinking about anger management. On top of that were the complicated interplay of poverty and interpersonal violence.
It was an unfair, sometimes brutal time. I learned how to be deeply observant, watching for energy shifts in the unstable adults around me.
Then, as now, I learned on my curiosity, creativity, and wonder to survive.
Shame Monster Again
I tried to get 5 houses worth of hazardous materials to the transfer station today and missed the cutoff by a few minutes. The minutes I spent visiting our kitten at our friend's.
Then I got home to an IRS letter.
I know how to handle it and we agree getting closer to being caught up, but it still left me feeling like a failure and a burden.
It didn't matter what I did during the day or how grateful our made our friends, our family of choice. The Shame Monster could only focus on my not getting there on time.
The whole evening just saw my anxiety build and the Shame Monster stomping around telling me I suck.
Then I stopped my phone and it bounced across the floor and into the water bowl! It is just fine, the OtterBox helped and I was damn fast to grab it and wrap it in a towel!
I finally gave up on cleaning the kitchen, worked on art, then took as long shower. As I got ready for the shower it finally got me that I forgot to take my bedtime pills!
I'm wondering if I worker need more of the medication for my brain, particularly the part of CPTSD that creates the Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or if I might benefit from taking it at dinner with my antidepressant.
This might help with Shame Monster's nightly rampaging.
Postponing Joy
I have several articles of clothing I never wear at home. I put them on to leave. I avoid wearing them at home because they’d get dog or cat hair on them, would start to show wear, etc.
These are mostly things I wore to teach. Some things for fancy occasions. My “nice” clothes as opposed to my “play” clothes.
I started wearing a sweater I would wear while teaching to keep me warm at the end and between classes. It finally hit me that I really don’t need to save them, I don’t know when I’ll teach in person again, so I might as well enjoy my clothing now!
It’s made me wonder just how often, and in how many different ways, I postpone joy for dubious reasons. What undercurrent of shame believes I don’t deserve joy in the present moment?
It’s been a tough few weeks with my Shame Monster, “Whinnie”, telling me what a loser I am, what a drain on resources, etc. It’a exhausting, tedious, and driven by the election anxiety.
Maybe tomorrow will have hope.
I’m grateful for an unexpected urban ungulate feasting on windfall apples I saw when I took our leftover pumpkin curry over to AF’s.
Leveraging Resources
Just before going to therapy today I read this article by Alissa Quart about resilience, a need to reframe it because it becomes a kind of victim blaming. Instead we need to consider the resources people had access to, how they were able to leverage them; that's a measure of resilience.
It felt like a door opened, letting in a gust of air and light on the memory from age 5 where I am hearing JJ abusing LJ and TJ. The sound of TJ is so haunting that at first it was the only part of the memory I could call up. It blotted out all other memories of JJ's apartment, taking me several minutes until I could come up with a visual to anchor onto.
JJ became my caregiver when my Mother worked once we moved into the apartments in Gladstone, after leaving my Aunt's home in Redland. She lived in the apartment across from ours and her boys were very close in age, LJ being a bit older than me and TJ just a little younger.
A few years ago I went looking for these brothers, I found LJ. He told me that several years ago TJ killed himself. LJ had cut off their Mother many years ago, but TJ remained in contact.
As I've worked to integrate this memory I have felt caught in a whirlpool of grief about TJ. Why did LJ and I get "enough" resilience and TJ didn't? In a memory that's filled with injustice, this feels so terrible.
Today I remembered that TJ was dyslexic and had ADHD. I was already seen as "gifted, even though it would be 3 more years before it was acted on in school, and that got me special encouragement and praise from teachers. It set the stage for my getting extra support from teachers that I couldn't get from my family. I figured out how to leverage that resource right away. At age 6 I was already good at leveraging resources, just as I was at managing the emotions of unstable adults.
I had a vivid memory of TJ being berated by a teacher for not being able to make a "B" the right direction.
That's where the resilience gap is.
My therapist thinks that this meet might get fully integrated next session of we can get a good block of time on it. Need to focus on not talking about the election and get this memory done. Age Six's memory has been knocking on the door, so to speak.
Got to float today too which helped my pain a lot!
Voting and Other Acts of Self Care
Smoke cleared and just as my allergies recovered from that, Autumn arrived with its associated increase in mold allergens and all the tress are dropping leaves. I've had something of a permanent headache for several days to go with my increased sneezing.
Despite being exhausted, I've not been getting to be until nearly 1am most nights. I developed night owl tendencies in early childhood and they reassert dominance in my life pretty quickly and I've never been able to become an "early bird" kind of person.
I feel conflicted about napping during the day. The small, more legitimate concern, is that I'll throw off my ability to go to sleep later. The inaccurate, but larger worry is that I'm not getting enough done.
There's a long list of yard things that need doing. There's a long list of home repairs. There's the task of sorting and reducing stuff. There's paperwork to follow up on. There's stuff to mail out. There's day-to-day chores to keep the house pleasant. There's overdue chores we can't quite seem to get to.
All of that hangs there and I feel like I'm a terrible person for needing so much rest. Then it all burbles up at 2300 and I try to think of how many chores I can get done before my brain allows me to go to bed.
Which is why I finally took a nap for much of the afternoon. My headache felt better. The feeling of crushing dread was slightly reduced by laying under the weighted blanket for a couple of hours. I made us school lunch dinner with salads and homemade lemon tahini salad dressing, that was the fancy bit.
This meant I had the energy to sit down with CK tonight and vote. I love that we really sit down together and raise questions together, go read things and make sure we understand them together. She's even been making an estimate on the potential financial impact of any property tax related measures. I'll go drop them off in person tomorrow, despite it being early enough to mail them in.